So, I ABSOLUTELY know there's massive variation in this. Just want to get ahead of that.
What I'm looking for is...what do finances look like, casually, when you have a 100% paid off small (SMALL!) home. When a mortgage is out of the way, what's left to eat up your paycheck?
I suppose I'm looking for the sort of casual knowledge of expenses for this sort of life that your kids might pick up if they lived in your area with you in your home. En mass, pulled from multiple lemmy folks, so I can get an idea of general trends. I'm partial for info from the USA, but others reading this might appreciate statistics from other areas. :)
(People mistake how valuable this sort of "general idea" info is, I always see people going into the weeds on how every situation is different without bothering even giving a crappy signpost so I can see if I'm looking at a $5 expense or $500 or $5000. Knowing if something is going to be $5 or $5000 is very valuable, even if it's not some exact precise number. But I don't need to know if it's going to be exactly $392.29 if I wiggle my ears and tug my nose to get the right loophole, I just need to know that closer to $500 is correct, or whatever.)
I don't have family, so I missed out on "casual learning" opportunities, and don't have anyone to talk to IRL to get this info, so it's really hard to apply my city-living experience to try to extrapolate what life might be like if I make a goal to buy a small home in Nowheretown, USA to retire in 20 years down the line.
Anyway. So what do expenses look like if you have a small paid off house? What range do utilities run in for you (in your particular climate), what's home insurance like, what sort of unexpected expenses pop up when you own instead of rent?
What's utilities like for sewer and trash, especially? Those have always been rolled into my rent. Is rural internet still limited to DSL or satellite (or Starlink I guess these days), or has better infrastructure been rolled out in places over the past 20 years since I last looked for this info?
Edit: Also...talk to me about well water and well expenses, and septic tanks instead of sewer lines, and oil heating. I promise I'll listen!
Edit 2: Also talk to me about how propane works.
Thanks everyone. :)
My problem with getting and staying on budget is keeping up with data entry, YNAB and it's ilk are all too manual. And the automatic ones have issues pulling together all my accounts and reconsilling the transactions between them. For example, a $10 PayPal debit from my bank account and it's companion PayPal transaction should be correlated as the same transaction, but all the softwares I've tried would automatically treat them as separate no matter what I did. Which would ultimately throw off all the nice budget numbers making them uselss
I was hoping the genAI craziness would at least bore out a great fully automated budget system that would at least mostly solve my problem, but alas I still have yet to hear anything on that front :/
While not really a budget tool per say, I'd recommend checking out Beancount if you are looking for a power tool and you are comfortable with a bit of Python. The only really manual steps I have in my setup is downloading transactions from my banks and categorizing any transactions that the machine learning plugin fails to categorize.
It's definitely tedious to track everything. I do like the import feature and it covers maybe 80% of day to day transactions but yeah it's a pain to go and fix stuff. What your talking about with PayPal is what YNAB considers a transfer and payment and is usually part the 20% I have to fix. Bank to PayPal is a transfer transaction, PayPal to purchase is the payment. It can definitely get needlessly complicated and it sometimes automatically imports correctly, especially reoccurring payments or if the transfer is between two linked accounts.